Newsweek recognizes Wake Tech as one of America's top online colleges

Online learning has become a mainstay of higher education in just a few short years.

While the number of students taking online classes has slowly grown in the past couple of decades, it skyrocketed in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to about 73% of college students taking classes partially or wholly online, according to Inside Higher Ed.

One local college, Wake Technical Community College, was uniquely prepared when students needed to transition to online learning.

“Wake Tech is not new to online — or distance — education,” said Bryan Ryan, Wake Tech’s senior vice president of effectiveness and innovation. “The college recognized the potential of internet-based learning before the year 2000 and spent more than a decade implementing the hardware infrastructure, software tools, human resources and support services needed to expand student access to remote learning.”

Newsweek and Statista worked together to determine the quality of online colleges by asking students about their satisfaction with their schools and whether they would recommend them to others. The resulting ranking includes the top 150 colleges and universities that offer online courses, including Wake Tech — the only North Carolina community college to make the list.

“Wake Tech has long embraced a future-forward approach to higher education, fostering a culture of innovation focused on creating evidence-supported solutions to anticipated and unanticipated challenges,” said Ryan.

That approach has led to Wake Tech serving as the state’s largest community college, with over 70,000 students attending annually. It offers more than 100 fully online programs, the most of any community college in the nation.

“This is not something new,” said Scott Ralls, Ph.D., president of Wake Tech. “It’s not because of something that’s happened in the last couple of years. The development of the online program goes back for a decade or more.”

In fact, community colleges are in a way the pioneers of online education since the student population was more likely than other colleges to include many full-time workers who needed flexible schedules, said Ralls. The average age of Wake Tech students is 26.

“Foresight and strategies going back eight to ten years ago made us prepared and capable in online education before the pandemic,” said Ralls. “We had already made significant technology investments and the county has helped us have redundancy and resiliency of our technology.”

For example, reliable internet is crucial to online education, and Wake County has worked to provide that to residents. Alongside that investment, Wake Tech offers technical support to help students and staff with troubleshooting.

“What really sets us apart is our focus on what it takes to make sure all students succeed,” said Ralls. “We make sure that, prior to teaching online courses, our faculty go through a certification process to prepare to teach in a virtual environment and students go through a training program to be prepared to take online courses.”

That process is called EPIC, eLearning Preparedness Initiative Across the College.

“Wake Tech launched EPIC in 2015 to improve the quality of its online programming through an intentional effort focused on better preparing students to learn online and faculty to teach online,” said Ryan.

EPIC is a 30-hour online teaching certification that covers the Blackboard learning management system, navigation, accessibility, universal design for learning, and best practices for online course design.

“Because EPIC was well established when the college was forced to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by shifting almost all classes to remote delivery, Wake Tech did not see the same level of disruption to learning as did other colleges and universities,” said Ryan.

EPIC and the student course, e-Learning Intro, have improved success rates and closed the gaps between online and in-person performance from 12% in 2016 to no gap in 2020.

“Another impact of EPIC is that Wake Tech has developed a cadre of professional eLearning technologists, accessibility technologists and instructional designers to support online teaching,” said Ryan.